YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHY YOU THINK THE WAY YOU DO

Saturday

Jul 13, 2013 at 11:03 PM

Carlo Baldino

The Reverend Johnny Green is a Korean War veteran and the pastor of St. Mark’s Missionary Baptist Church in Brookhaven, Mississippi. When my wife and I had a winter home in the Magnolia State I spent a lot of time with him, and he told me numerous stories about growing up in the Jim Crow South.

One story he told me took place on a Saturday night prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. An angry white man marched into a Black neighborhood in Brookhaven. The sounds of gunfire were heard, and a Black man was shot dead. The white man strolled casually back to the main street and went on his way. “Nobody did nuthin',” Reverend Green said.

Here’s another case from that same small city listed in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website on Civil Rights martyrs:

AUGUST 13, 1955 • BROOKHAVEN, MISSISSIPPI

"Lamar Smith was shot dead on the courthouse lawn by a white man in broad daylight while dozens of people watched. The killer was never indicted because no one would admit they saw a white man shoot a black man. Smith had organized blacks to vote in a recent election."

Nobody did nuthin’ then, either.

Stay with me now. Both these events occurred between 50 and 60 years ago. But last week a Black contractor in Dorchester was remodeling a bathroom for a white couple, and during the week he worked there the subject of the Trayvon Martin killing came up in conversation.

“Well,” the white man said to the contractor, “we know Zimmerman is guilty. But OJ was guilty, too.”

When he related this story the contractor, who lived in Alabama as a child and a Cleveland ghetto as a young adult before moving to Roxbury, was shaking his head. “Do you believe it?” he said. “White people killed and lynched thousands of Black folks and got away with it. They raped our women and got away with it. Now they think because OJ got away with killing his ex-wife everything is even. And they want it more even so Zimmerman can get away with doing it.”

There was an 80-year-old Black woman in Mississippi who made a very keen observation: “White folks are somethin’ else,” she said.

Well, not all white folks. There’s a definite line between white conservative Republicans and white liberal Democrats when it comes to their perception of this trial. MSNBC is advocating justice for Trayvon. Fox News has an opposite viewpoint. These two networks may as well be talking about Obama. Perhaps, in a symbolic sense, they are.

Fox’s talk show host Sean Hannity had George Zimmerman as a guest on his show. Zimmerman said he wouldn’t have done anything differently and that Trayvon’s death was “God’s plan.” Recently Hannity had Mark Fuhrman, the LA cop from the OJ trial famous for his use of the “N” word, speculating on whether or not Black folks would riot in the case of a Zimmerman acquittal. If one reads comments written under articles about the case, there’s no conclusion to be drawn other than a whole lot of conservative white people are rooting for Zimmerman to walk away with no penalty for what he did---just like the shooter in Jim Crow Brookhaven.

Black people see an acquittal as a message that it’s OK to return to the past, to what Reverend Green and the Black contractor witnessed in their lifetimes. White people see it in a completely different light, but they insist that race has nothing to do with their perception.

If you tell me whom you voted for (Obama or Romney, Warren or Brown, Markey or Gomez) I’ll tell you how you see this trial, and I’ll have a 95% success rate.

In the last segment of his speech at the Million-Man March, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan addressed the topic of white supremacy, and he directed his remarks to white America.

“You don’t even know why you think the way you do,” he said to the white television audience.

Based on the comments under my last blog, it seems that none of the conservative commenters would have had the slightest problem with their unarmed son or grandson being killed by a pistol-toting wannabe cop who had no authority to follow and harass a young man he profiled as “suspicious.”

They’d give the defense the benefit of the doubt, they’d take the shooter’s word about his life being threatened, and if there were evidence their son or grandson had fought back they’d just shrug their shoulders, say “what are you gonna do,” and applaud the killer’s acquittal.

I believe them. I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the body and life everlasting…

And I believe them. Because conservative white folks are somethin’ else, and they don’t even know why they think the way they do.

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